Outline

  • recap + discuss paper 📑
  • interacting with computers 🪄
  • installation of programs 🔨

Recap last lecture

  • textual data is challenging 🤯
  • machine-readable data 🚧
  • reproducible research using computational approach ♻️

Reading

Computational Social Science (Lazer et al. 2009)

  • data-driven
  • network analysis + text analysis
  • historical perspective vs. real-time dynamics
  • issues: limited access to data and new methods

Computers

Operating Systems (OS)

Between hardware and applications

  • Microsoft Windows
  • macOS
  • Linux-based systems 🤓

User Interfaces (UI)

Graphical User Interface (GUI)

Command Line Interface (CLI)

“An awesome programmer saves the world”

Human-Machine Interaction

Tell the computer efficiently 🎯

  • text commands instead of clicks
  • similar to human languages
    • syntax (form)
    • semantics (meaning)
  • computers are literalists

Programming

  • command languages
    • Bourne-Again shell (Bash), since 1989
  • programming languages
    • Python, R, Java, C++ etc.
  • instructions → program ≡ algorithm
    • analogous to cooking

Package Manager 📦

App stores for engineers

  • automation of software installation

    • system: apt, Homebrew
    • Python: pip, poetry, conda

  • packages have dependencies

Open-Source is a mindset

Standing on the shoulders of giants

  • free + open software
  • cross-platform portability
  • collaboration
    • share + reuse
  • helpful community

Organizing data and code

  • Git tracks file changes and supports version management
  • GitHub is a popular hosting platform based on Git
    • share code and collaborate
    • repository = project folder

🤓 Publishing code and data are key to open science.

Resources everyone is using

  • Stack Overflow
    • where you get answers to technical questions
  • GitHub
    • where you find open software
  • ChatGPT
    • ask anything if you get stuck

Learning by doing, doing by Googleing + ChatGPTing.
🤸‍♀️🤸‍♂️

Set up your System

Backup 👹

You don’t need it until you desperately need it!

Setting up your Development Environment

Installation

  • Python 3
    • packages for NLP + visualization
  • Tesseract
  • various Bash tools
  • VS Code Editor

👉 Follow the installation guide for your OS + the Python chapter.

Relax.
It takes a while.

VS Code Editor

The Microsoft Word for coding

  • powerful integrated development environment (IDE)
  • cross-platform
  • interactive analysis

Write your first Python script in VS Code

First steps in Python

Learn Python with interactive tutorials

Readings

Optional: pimp your workflow

Healy, Kieran. 2019. “The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science.” online.

References

Healy, Kieran. 2019. “The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science.” https://kieranhealy.org/publications/plain-person-text/.
Lazer, David, Alex Pentland, Lada Adamic, Sinan Aral, Albert-László Barabási, Devon Brewer, Nicholas Christakis, et al. 2009. “Computational Social Science.” Science 323 (5915): 721–23. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1167742.